Welcome to 2015. We spent last year writing a novel, one step at a time, from Theme Statement to Archiving the Manuscript.

Non writers have the mistaken idea writing takes up all of a writer’s time. All we have to do is string together enough words to make a book, play, or short story; edit those words; and bang, we’re done.

We writers know a different tale. To quote myself, and writer/counsellor Claudia McCants

When we are in this writing game long-term, we learn to be on intimate terms with qualities like balance, persistence, patience, reinvention, and most of all, hope. Our journey this year will explore what gets in our way as writers and ways that some writers have found around those things.

Look out world, here we come

Yesterday was the 12th day of Christmas; today is Little Christmas, or the Christian feast of the Epiphany. In other words, the December holidays are over for another year. At our house, the last 12 days had some good things, and some not so good. Frankly, I am exhausted. I need a holiday to recover from the holidays, but hey, it’s already January 6th, and I am SO, SO far behind.

Fortunately, last year I came across some very sage advice from a woman named Jennifer Louden. She says whenever people, particularly women, are faced with moving from a vacation, holidays, or time off back into the swing things, we tell ourselves six lies, in essence that we have to

reenter life full speed

punish ourselves for having the audacity to have had a good time

do an immediate self-make over

put all those good times completely out of sight, and out of mind

acknowledge that we are failures because we took a break

put everyone else first because we’ve been terribly selfish to do something good for ourselves